The Cardinal sat to Manisty's right, one wrinkled hand resting on the neck of the Newfoundland. It was a typical Italian face, large-cheeked and large-jawed, with good eyes,—a little sleepy, but not unspiritual. His red-edged cassock allowed a glimpse of red stockings to be seen, and his finely worked cross and chain, his red sash, and the bright ribbon that lit up his broad-brimmed hat, made spots of cheerful colour in the shadow of the trees.
He was a Cardinal of the Curia, belonging indeed to the Congregation of the
Index. The vulgar believed that he was staying on the hills for his health.
The initiated, however, knew that he had come to these heights, bringing with him the works of a certain German Catholic professor threatened with the thunders of the Church. It was a matter that demanded leisure and a quiet mind.
As he sat sipping Miss Manisty's tea, however, nothing could be divined of those scathing Latin sheets on which he had left his secretary employed. He had the air of one at peace with all the world—hardly stirred indeed by the brilliance of his host.
'Italy again!'—said Reggie Brooklyn in Lucy's ear—poor old Italy!—one might be sure of that, when one sees one of these black gentlemen about.'
The Cardinal indeed had given Manisty his text. He had brought an account of some fresh vandalism of the Government—the buildings of an old Umbrian convent turned to Government uses—the disappearance of some famous pictures in the process, supposed to have passed into the bands of a Paris dealer by the connivance of a corrupt official.
The story had roused Manisty to a white heat. This maltreatment of religious buildings and the wasting of their treasures was a subject on which he was inexhaustible. Encouraged by the slow smile of the Cardinal, the laughter and applause of the young men, he took the history of a monastery in the mountains of Spoleto, which had long been intimately known to him, and told it,—with a variety, a passion, an irony, that only he could achieve—that at last revealed indeed to Lucy Foster, as she sat quivering with antagonism beside Miss Manisty, all the secret of the man's fame and power in the world.
For gradually—from the story of this monastery, and its suppression at the hands of a few Italian officials—he built up a figure, typical, representative, according to him, of the New Italy, small, insolent, venal,—insulting and despoiling the Old Italy, venerable, beautiful and defenceless. And then a natural turn of thought, or a suggestion from one of the group surrounding him, brought him to the scandals connected with the Abyssinian campaign—to the charges of incompetence and corruption which every Radical paper was now hurling against the Crispi government. He gave the latest gossip, handling it lightly, inexorably, as one more symptom of an inveterate disease, linking the men of the past with the men of the present, spattering all with the same mud, till Italian Liberalism, from Cavour to Crispi, sat shivering and ugly—stripped of all those pleas and glories wherewith she had once stepped forth adorned upon the page of history.
Finally—with the art of the accomplished talker—a transition! Back to the mountains, and the lonely convent on the heights—to the handful of monks left in the old sanctuary, handing on the past, waiting for the future, heirs of a society which would destroy and outlive the New Italy, as it had destroyed and outlived the Old Rome,—offering the daily sacrifice amid the murmur and solitude of the woods,—confident, peaceful, unstained; while the new men in the valleys below peculated and bribed, swarmed and sweated, in the mire of a profitless and purposeless corruption.
And all this in no set harangue—but in vivid broken sentences; in snatches of paradox and mockery; of emotion touched and left; interrupted, moreover, by the lively give and take of conversation with the young Italians, by the quiet comments of the Cardinal. None the less, the whole final image emerged, as Manisty meant it to emerge; till the fascinated hearers felt, as it were, a breath of hot bitterness and hate pass between them and the spring day, enveloping the grim phantom of a ruined and a doomed State.